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BioArt: Is It Art? Is It Science? Is It the Future?

When artist Eduardo Kac presented Alba, a genetically engineered fluorescent rabbit, to the world in 2000 and dubbed her "transgenic art," it stirred up a great deal of controversy: Was "GFP Bunny" truly an art form? Was this type of genetic modification — in the name of art — ethical?

Bioart, a term coined by Kac, aims to provoke social discussion. Pushing the envelope like this is nothing new in the art world — from da Vinci to Duchamp, artists throughout history have often traversed new, controversial territories to awaken social consciousness, encourage thought-provoking conversation and address pressing existential questions. Though there is some speculation on a precise definition, the label "bioart" serves as an umbrella term for the use of living tissues, bacteria and organisms in creating intriguing –- and often shocking -– works of art.

"The lab is a garden, and the bioartist is the gardener for the new millennium," posits the CUT/PASTE/GROW Science at Play: Bioart in Brooklynwebsite. The exhibition, hosted by Observatory and Genspace last March, brought together a number of bioartists from around the globe, displaying their "living art" works and experiments. Exhibits at the show ranged from Kac's Edunia, a human/petunia hybrid (created by introducing human DNA into the plant), to Physarum polycephalumslime mold pattern experiments by Heather Barnett. The exhibition was partially funded though a Kickstarter campaign.

We spoke with Wythe Marschall, a curator for CUT/PASTE/GROW and writer on futurism, about the exhibition and his thoughts on bioart.

Q&A With Observatory Curator Wythe Marschall

My role was to represent the hosting gallery, Observatory, which is part of Proteus Gowanus. I organized the gallery lectures related to the show: Emily Anthes on biotechnology and animals; Jessica Wapner on the first "rationally designed" drug; our own Will Myers on his book BioDesign.

There were also a few events outside of the gallery or Genspace. With Dan, Karen and Grace, I conducted a free bacterial painting event at SXSW 2013's Create festival, which led to a large glowing bacterial mosaic in the shape of a unicorn, designed by Karen.

With Grace and Karen, I brought the show to World Science Festival 2013 in Brooklyn; this was a one-day chance to show the art to a new crowd, including a lot of children.

I'm a fiction writer and historian, so my main contribution to the show was recruiting people like Dan, Will and Nurit who know the DIYbio and bioart scenes much better than I do. And we all relied a lot on Karen and Grace, operationally. That's the proper role, I think, of a good curator/producer: Deputize, delegate and admit when you don't know what the hell you're doing!

The show itself took place earlier this year — is this likely to be a repeat event, or are there other similar bioart shows in the works for Observatory?

The immediate successor to CUT/PASTE/GROW is Will's Biodesign show in Rotterdam. Will's book really inspired our show in many ways, and I only wish I could fly to the Netherlands right now to see the exhibition!

In terms of another U.S. exhibition, there may be some CPG-related events at Genspace or SXSW (or other venues) in the future, but Observatory has no plans to host further iterations at this time. (I was one of the main curators at Observatory for four years, producing a lot of talks about futurism and curating three shows, but I'm no longer in Brooklyn and so can't be as involved.)

What are some of the most interesting projects or exhibits you’ve worked with, written about or seen?

My favorite bioart is by Tuur Van Balen and Revital Cohen ("Cohen Van Balen") and Under Tomorrows Sky (organized by CPG-exhibited artist Liam Young, an architect). Young's project is a consortium of futurists who envision a non-apocalyptic city of tomorrow that involves many imaginative interactions between ecology, biotechnology, urban design and (human and nonhuman) culture. I love work like this that doesn't dwell on an apocalypse unlikely to come; non-apocalypse and non-utopia are a real challenge to capital. More artists should be playing in this space.

Regarding Tuur Van Balen, he was insistent that he is not a "bioartist," as the term is constricting professionally. This may be quite true; I still use the term "bioart," however, to refer to specific art works that involve biotechnology.

Image: Flickr/amymyou/Scorpion used in experiments, as seen in the Insectory at Ohio State University.

Obviously, "living art" poses some challenges. What would you say are the biggest obstacles, particularly in regards to putting on a show like CUT/PASTE/GROW?

Working with slime molds, as part of Heather Barnett's workshop at Genspace, presented the opposite challenge. Slime molds aren't very interesting minute-by-minute. They really shine via time elapse videography. And I accidentally killed mine inside of a week, perhaps by not changing its oats often enough.

Ultimately, humans, especially children, always present the biggest challenges to art shows of any genre. Humans spill wine, cough during performances, touch the art works, break things, argue about "Franken-" art (really, about "Franken-" anything) without attempting to learn the first thing about biology. Humans can be wonderful. They're the audience for any art show. And yet for a bioart show, as for the biosphere itself, humans remain the major threat.

In your opinion and based on your experience, how do you think that scientists/artists can best maintain ethics when experimenting with bioart?

I'm not sure that ethics are more troubled by bioart than by, say, for-profit biotech practices such as drug design, testing accused criminals' DNA samples against samples found at crime scenes, engineering plants to express proteins that they don't express in the wild and so on.

If anything, bioart is rising to prominence alongside these more "useful" biotech practices because art, like all forms of play (and all forms of critique), opens up a space in which we can ask important questions about what we're doing without having to commit ourselves to a political position.

Art gives us this critical distance, and bioart does so in a special way now, in the age of "big biology" — genomics, bioinformatics, systems biology, Human Genome Project, ENCODE, epigenetics, gene therapies and especially genomic diagnostic tests that create risk. These are fast-moving, hugely culturally important enterprises.

Ethically, artists, like the rest of us, need to reflect upon these big biology projects — explain them, reimagine them, challenge them and ultimately build sophisticated multimodal critiques of them. Bioart is only one symptom of a larger cultural impulse to keep up with technoscientific developments.

Do you have any suggestions or recommended resources for anyone looking to learn more about bioart?

As far as I know the best popular book on the subject is BioDesign by William Myers. Art in the Age of Technoscience by Ingeborg Reichle is equally rich but intended for a more academic reader. Both feature great images of major works within the genre, and I recommend both to any serious student of bioart. To Life! by Linda Weintraub is an excellent survey of eco-art which naturally also features quite a lot of bioart. Her book is intended as a textbook for environmental art professors, but it's another good resource.

At the end of our show, two young documentarians started a great project called DIYsect and were kind enough to feature CPG. DIYsect is a major new resource for those of us who want to keep up with developments in DIYbio, including bioart.

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